React Portable Text

An easy way to render Portable Text block content in React applications.

Quick Example

yarn add react-portable-text

import PortableText from "react-portable-text"

const YourComponent = ({ portableTextContent }) => (
  <div>
    <PortableText
      // Pass in block content straight from Sanity.io
      content={portableTextContent}
      // Optionally override marks, decorators, blocks, etc. in a flat
      // structure without doing any gymnastics
      serializers={{
        h1: (props) => <h1 style={{ color: "red" }} {...props} />,
        li: ({ children }) => <li className="special-list-item">{children}</li>,
        someCustomType: YourComponent,
      }}
    />
  </div>
)

Why not just use @sanity/block-content-to-react directly?

I found it difficult to create abstractions on top of @sanity/block-content-to-react. Remembering whether a serializer needed to be codified as a type, a mark, or as something under block was challenging, and the special treatment for lists and list items was confusing. Further, the props being wrapped in an object under the node property, or extraneous props for mark types meant I was creating intermediate component types just to avoid passing invalid props to the React elements (otherwise they render in the DOM).

React Portable Text uses @sanity/block-content-to-react under the hood, but maps each of these types to the correct place in the serializers for you and normalizing props to match the fields supplied by users in your Sanity Studio, simplifying the cognitive load required to author new ones.

Serializer Documentation

React Portable Text maps the following types explicitly, and treats all other properties of the serializers object as custom types. Custom types are used for both type and block blocks (i.e. custom marks as well as custom block-level insertion types).

Serializer	Notes
Marks
link	All link marks used for anchor links
strong	Bold/strong text
em	Emphasized/italic text
underline	Underlined text
del	Text with strikethrough styles
code	Inline text with code styling
Lists
ul	Unordered lists
ol	Ordered lists
li	List items for any type of list
Blocks
h1	Heading level 1
h2	Heading level 2
h3	Heading level 3
h4	Heading level 4
h5	Heading level 5
h6	Heading level 6
normal	Paragraph styles
blockquote	Blockquote styles
Special Types
container	Override the component wrapping the blocks
block	Override the default block serializer (not recommended)
span	Override the default span serializer (not recommended)
hardBreak	Serializer for newlines; defaults to br; pass false to preserve newlines
unknownType	Fallback for blocks of unknown type, if ignoreUnknownTypes is set to false (default)
unknownMark	Fallback for marks of unknown type; defaults to a plain span

Additional Props

Additional props are passed through to @sanity/block-content-to-react, so if you want to configure imageOptions or set the projectId and dataset options you can just pass them directly to React Portable Text:

<PortableText
  content={blockContent}
  projectId={process.env.SANITY_PROJECT_ID}
  dataset={process.env.SANITY_DATASET}
/>

Rendering Plain Text

As a bonus, react-portable-text offers a function that will render your portable text content to a plaintext string. This is often useful for previews and such in the Studio and for ancillary uses of content in contexts where formatting is not supported (e.g. calendar invite descriptions, meta tags, etc.).

import { blockContentToPlainText } from "react-portable-text"

const MetaDescription = ({ content }) => (
  <meta name="description" content={blockContentToPlainText(content)} />
)

Contributing

Did I miss something? Is something not compatible with your setup? Open an issue with details, and if possible, a CodeSandbox reproduction. Pull requests are also welcomed!

License

Copyright ©2022 Corey Ward. Available under the MIT License.